


Warmth

by baku_midnight



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Established Relationship, Fluff, Illness, M/M, Recovery, Romance, The Hilltop (Walking Dead)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-20
Updated: 2016-11-20
Packaged: 2018-09-01 01:41:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8602204
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/baku_midnight/pseuds/baku_midnight
Summary: Inspired by the story on the askdarus roleplay blog. Jesus becomes ill, and with winter coming, his prospects aren't good. Daryl won't let anything happen to him, however.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by the story on askdarus.tumblr.com. It's just such a cute story, I check it every day and it just warms me right up. This story takes place in the timeline of the blog, but it's just my own little coda to the events that happen therein. If you don't already, you should definitely follow the blog.

It was a combination of a slight fever, nausea and a perhaps not unfounded sense of urgency that had Jesus checking himself into the clinic first thing in the morning, while frost still clung to the ground and windows in a thin, crystalline sheen. It’d barely been a few hours stuck in bed by order of Alex— _not_ Doctor Carson, Jesus had insisted he _not_ be informed—and he was as antsy as the living fucking dead.

 

It didn’t help that Jesus’d checked himself in while Daryl was out on a run, specifically because he knew the hunter would try to involve himself in some disastrously obtrusive way. For whatever reason, Daryl had no mid-range in between “emotionally unresponsive” and “dangerously over-committed”. Jesus made the quiet transition out of their trailer and into the medical one moments after Daryl left for the morning to hunt, and now he sat half-anxious of the worried anger and profanity Daryl would greet him with when he found out.

 

Jesus settled back against the head of the cot—a pop-up gurney wrested out of the clutches of four undead paramedics and fashioned into a sick bed—and let out a long sigh. His limbs felt jittery and his temperature was high enough that it made everything around him feel cold. A dull pain throbbed through him every time he moved, and his throat felt like a broken fork was stuck down it. Before the New World reared its ugly head, Paul would’ve taken an aspirin and went to bed to wait out the pain, but in the PTSD-version of suburban America in which he now lived, there was a little more urgency to his recovery. He needed to get better, and soon. The Saviours could come by any minute, and he wasn’t convinced of Hilltop’s chances to avoid disaster reliant only on Gregory’s negotiation skills.

 

Jesus’s eyes traced Alex across the trailer as the nurse unaffectedly recorded his temperature and gathered his next dose of medication. Half an aspirin dissolved in tepid water. Just lovely. Jesus sipped the draught with a wince of disgust.

 

Alex shuffled around behind him and helped Paul sit up. The slightest movement was agony, but he went with little complaint, allowing himself to sit up and for Alex to lift his shirt. The cool press of a stethoscope landed just beneath his shoulder blade as Jesus suffered a deep breath. Alex placed his palm on the opposing shoulder and Daryl chose just that moment to enter the room.

 

“What the hell’s this shit?!” Daryl barked, lunging forward, angling himself for a fight. Jesus jolted, vision blurring as pain rocketed through his body at the sudden movement.

 

“Wash your hands, or so help me—!” Alex ordered back, raising a hand to stop Daryl coming any closer. Daryl’s hands were caked in dirt and (what was probably) animal blood up to the wrists, and there was a smear of dirt up his cheek, but he paused, conceding to the small order. He glared Alex down for a short moment while Jesus readied himself for a fight, but finally Daryl turned and wandered back to the door where a bucket of soapy water was waiting.

 

It wasn’t exactly the greatest sanitation solution, but it was better than nothing, so Daryl scrubbed his hands under the cold water before drying them on the adjacent towel, glaring sideways at Alex all the while. Jesus stared him down, intense green gaze going unheeded.

 

“Mind tellin’ me what the fuck you’re doin’ with your hands all over him?” Daryl asked, squaring up on the opposing side of the cot, which Alex had wisely placed between them. Alex was trying to be brave, bless him, but it was clear the wolfish man terrified him.

 

“Checking his lung sounds? You know, because he’s sick?” Alex huffed, rolling his eyes and stepping back, his task done. Like most circumstances, Daryl reacted to his own fear with indignant rage.

 

“The fuck? Why din’t no one tell me?!” Daryl snapped, eyes dark and narrowed to a point. He paced back and forth on the linoleum like a trapped tiger along a fence.

 

“It just happened this morning,” Jesus said back, too tired and sore to argue. He brought a hand to his nose and gripped the bridge, trying to ward off a headache. “It’s probably just the flu. I didn’t want to get anyone else sick, that’s the only reason I’m in here.”

 

It was a lie, or rather, a generous obfuscation of the truth, and not the first he’d told Daryl. And probably not as damaging as “Gregory is a _bit_ of a prick” or “Alex and I were _barely_ even together” turned out to be.

 

Daryl went quiet, finding no way to argue and shuffling his feet instead. He still looked like a predator ready to pounce, but a concerned one, at least.

 

“What’s _he_ doin’ here, then?” Daryl asked, pointing vaguely at Alex. Aaaand there it was. The crux of the issue. How foolish of Jesus to think it was his own welfare in peril, not Daryl’s misplaced sense of jealous duty.

 

“Taking my temperature, giving me medication—”

 

“Why not the doctor?”

 

“Harlan has better things to worry about,” Jesus informed, “David twisted his knee on the last run he went on—”

 

Daryl leaned close all of the sudden, staring Jesus directly in the eyes, blue gaze heated and fierce. His breath bounced off of Jesus’s cheekbones as he puffed, “you think I give a _shit_ about _his_ sorry ass?”

 

Jesus blinked back. Maybe that was supposed to be Daryl’s messed-up, overactive sense of care, but Jesus was in no mood to accept it.

 

“ _I_ think you’re being a real asshole right now.”

 

Daryl’s nostrils flexed with rage. He glared at Jesus a moment more, then shuffled his feet, made fists, and walked to the end of the room. It looked like he was about to leave the trailer entirely, but he stopped short and turned to stand sentinel at the door instead, arms crossed like a defiant statue.

 

Alex and Jesus tried to simply ignore him, Alex continuing his recording of Jesus’s symptoms—without a working clock the effort was rather abstract, but better than nil—and Jesus trying to keep the room from spinning. It seemed to work out well, their awkward arrangement of one ill, one tending and one standing guard, until Jesus started to cough and couldn’t stop.

 

Jesus doubled over on himself, choking and hacking, drawing in wheezing, miserable breaths in between. He tried to calm himself as his heart raced to full speed with the rush of adrenaline that flooded through him at the prospect of suffocating to death. Alex patted his back, rubbing soothingly and trying to alleviate his terror, and Daryl ran immediately over, standing at Jesus’s other side and making up the difference panic-wise.

 

“What’s happenin’?!”

 

“Paul, can you sit up tall for me?”

 

“What the fuck’s happenin’ to him?!”

 

“Deep breaths, Paul. I know it’s hard. Just think about it and it’ll come.”

 

“Why don’t you get your damn hands offa him!”

 

Unable to reply with any sort of fire unimpeded by a wheezing cough, Jesus was forced to listen as the two men squabbled above him—rather, while Daryl antagonized while Alex tried valiantly to ignore him—and it did little to help his mood. When the coughing fit finally subsided, and Jesus recovered enough breath to speak, he told them both off.

 

“I’ve had this before,” Jesus panted, “I think I just need some rest. Some peace and quiet. Can I have that, please?”

 

“I really think you could be developing pneumonia, Paul. Remember last winter, Suzanne—”

 

“ _Please_.” Jesus asked, more of an order, now, and Alex’s lips settled in a firm line. He did _not_ need to think about last winter, now. The cold, bitter nights seemed to stretch on for ages, walkers quieted in their raucous migration, replaced by horrors more precarious and abstract, primal fears, like cold, hunger and insomnia. A shudder ran through his body, born half of fever and half of sad memory.

 

“Alright, then, I’ll stay nearby, though,” Alex muttered, avoiding Daryl’s gaze as he walked past, though it was clear he was issuing a challenge. Daryl leapt immediately on it, hackles rising as he planted himself sentry against the wall flanking Jesus’s bed.

 

“So you’re just going to stay here, all day long?” Jesus wheezed, disbelieving, as Daryl crossed his arms so tightly over his chest, he could’ve broken ribs.

 

“Yup,” Daryl grunted. Well, great.

 

 

 

The illness worsened throughout the day, and the following one wasn’t any better. The temperature dipped lower and lower outside while Jesus’s seemed to rise by the minute. He had to strip off everything but his loose peasant shirt and slacks and settle under the covers, which consisted of a thin cotton sheet and ancient knit quilt, gathered from some under-the-stairs closet in Barrington house, probably dating back to Confederation times, when it kept some old granny occupied during cold, empty rural evenings.

 

It was awkward, but somehow comforting to see Daryl stood guard every time Jesus woke moaning and crying from some restless bout of aching sleep, reassuring to know Daryl would always be there to glare at him from his post hovering around the door or seated in a chair near the bed. Alex left to eat and take the occasional nap, like a normal, self-regulating human being, but Daryl remained, still and quiet as a hunter in a blind.

 

For his part, Jesus could barely move, either. He was glad for the dignity of being able to sit up, until the second evening in bed took that from him, too. He was too sore to even lift his head, which felt heavy and filled with lead. His lips and nose were unbearably dry and breathing was a chore. He couldn’t eat, and water with sugar, salt and aspirin dissolved in it barely sated him, but his insides were too inflamed to suffer anything more substantial.

 

Jesus was usually the more talkative of the two of them, leaving Daryl to brood in silence, but now he could barely muster a chiding remark or careful tease. He pulled the blankets up to his nose and rolled onto his left side to ease the pain of the full-body migraine that now plagued him.

 

“S’pose you’re still pissed at me?” Daryl mumbled, suddenly, catching Jesus’s ears.

 

“What for, exactly?” Jesus croaked back sardonically, voice weak and crackling, “telling me you’re leaving as soon as spring comes, or acting like a fucking creep around the guy who’s trying to cure me?”

 

Daryl shrugged. “Both, I guess.”

 

Whether or not the acknowledgement was as close to an apology as Jesus was going to get at the moment, he decided to leave the issues aside for now, realizing he’d rather not go to his grave stewing in righteous anger. Stewing in sweat and musk was enough; he hadn’t showered since he came here and was practically sweating nonstop, going back and forth between shivering and being so hot he had to throw the covers on the floor, only to find them back over him when he awoke from another ill-timed nap. His hair was heavy with grease and rolled across the pillow like wires.

 

Suddenly, Daryl was out of his line of sight, and Jesus felt the bed dip behind him as the man climbed in. He pulled back the covers just far enough to let himself inside, curling up behind Jesus and wrapping his arms around his chest.

 

“Oh, no, for God’s sake, Daryl, you’re gonna get sick,” Jesus bemoaned, wincing as his body protested shifting even slightly with an entire chorus of painful jolts and jabs.

 

“Don’t care,” came a gruff voice right next to his ear, as Daryl settled his chin into Jesus’s shoulder, nuzzling into his hair. A prominent nose and scruffy chin prodded the back of his head, and Jesus couldn’t help but sink a little into the embrace, allowing himself to be spooned, with Daryl’s chest pressed to his back, Daryl’s lap against the back of his thighs, their ankles stacked together. Daryl’s body was firm and strong, cradling Jesus calmly in his arms. Jesus couldn’t help but let a bit of a sigh spool out of him, vapour on the surface of a lake, warmed by the earliest glimpse of sun.

 

“Y’okay?” Daryl rasped, nuzzling Paul’s ear lobe with his nose, the cold tip of it soothing the burning skin.

 

“I feel like a guy who hasn’t eaten or bathed for _days_ ; I stink, my scalp itches, and I feel irritable as mother-loving _hell_ ,” Jesus replied. “God, now I know how it must feel to be _you_.”

 

A small breath against his neck belied a quirk burst of amusement, enough to lift Jesus’s spirits for a moment.

 

“Shuddup.”

 

 

 

 

The winter weather continued to approach, seemingly growing closer by the hour, finally dropping the first batch of snow on the ground the next morning. It was shallow and dry, but enough to slick the roads and weigh down the plants in the fields that weren’t quite quick enough to hide their leaves for the coming cold. It would’ve been Daryl’s first encounter with snow, but he wasn’t able to see it from his secure place in the medical trailer, tucked behind Jesus and holding him while he slept off his agonizing cramps and aches. When Paul slept, he didn’t cough, which was reassuring, but even the sound of him viciously hacking up his lungs was becoming more encouraging than the silence that now filled the trailer. Jesus’s breathing was laboured even while he was asleep, and his fever was horrendous enough it was starting to heat Daryl up as well, like sleeping next to a furnace.

 

Day broke in full and Alex wandered into the trailer, watching through one eye as Daryl readjusted his careful positioning around Jesus’s body, pulling him yet closer, as if the scant inch of space between them was too much. Alex couldn’t lie and tell himself that he didn’t want to be there, where Daryl was, curled around the sweetest man on earth. At his behest, Jesus had taken broad-spectrum antibiotics they’d gathered from a medical college a few weeks back, but they didn’t appear to be working.

 

Daryl shifted, expecting Jesus to wake when he lifted his arm—compressed and pins-and-needle-y beneath Jesus’s ribs—but he felt no reaction. In his arms, Jesus was rag-doll limp, unmoving and unresponsive. His limbs hung lifelessly from his barely-moving body. A bolt of dread stabbed through Daryl as he assumed the worst, but Jesus was still warm. Far _too_ warm.

 

“Paul,” Daryl whispered, lifting the man and turning him with some effort onto his back, across his arm, outstretched along the pillows. Jesus’s eyes didn’t open; his feather-dry lips were parted and only the tiniest amount of breath escaped them. “Paul!”

 

Alex came over quickly, rushing to lift the blankets from the cot and place his hand on Jesus’s chest, feeling how his fever had spread down from his forehead to his face to his neck and chest, his entire body flushed and boiling. The nurse touched him with his palms and the back of his hands, opening his peasant shirt to reveal a burgundy-mottled chest and clavicle. Worst of all, his skin was bone-dry.

 

“Oh God, he’s burning up,” Alex muttered, “he’s way too hot.” He didn’t need to double-check the mercury to know Jesus was nearing the threshold of brain damage.

 

“What do we do?!” Daryl asked, hands shaking as he sat up on one elbow, pulling Paul to him, cradling him protectively for lack of better course of action. His eyes were wide with panic, a sickening _dread_ coming through him. Was this it? Was this the end already? How could he have ever thought about letting Paul go? About leaving him alone for even a _moment?_ He wasn’t sure he could even live if Paul—

 

“Normally, we’d cool him down with ice packs…” Alex explained, rattling off inside his head as much procedure as he could, sifting through his own words for an answer, “but we don’t exactly have a freezer—”

 

He broke off mid-way as Daryl and he seemed to come to the same conclusion at the same time. _The snow._ Daryl practically leapt from the bed, leaning forward to scoop Paul up into his arms. He carefully lifted the man, lithe at the best of times and nearly starved at this point, as gently as he could, given his urgency. As the blood in Jesus’s body shifted, he started to twitch, eyes moving rapidly beneath his lids, head dropping back, slack against Daryl’s shoulder. He was beginning to seize, his condition worsening rapidly. It was like everything was coming to a head in the seconds it took to get Jesus out of the medical trailer and into the open air. Two days of nothing, and on the third, this nightmare.

 

The three burst outside, Alex quickly shooing away onlookers while Daryl paused a moment to just stare at the sight of Barrington house in the snow. A thin, wispy blanket of it covered every ancient shingle, lined each gutter and frosted every window, reminding him of the cartoons he used to watch around the holidays as a child. The snow was about two inches thick, soft, and crunching under their feet as the two men marched to a clear spot on the ground, unmarred by footsteps, and placed Jesus down.

 

Daryl knelt as carefully as a though he was carrying the finest crystal glass, and lowered Paul to the ground, resting him in the snow. The flakes pillowed around him, his still body like a snow angel, twitching slightly with unsettling seizure behaviour.

 

Alex began to scoop up snow and pile it in around Jesus’s neck and head, packing a few fistfuls with unfeeling fingers and sticking them under Jesus’s armpits and on top of his belly, which was bared by his rucked-up shirt. Daryl quickly copied him, adding more snow where the first bits melted and puddled on Paul’s pale skin, leaving it glistening in the greyish-white winter light. They needed an IV, Alex knew, but he continued undeterred, praying to anyone who might be listening that this _work_. Jesus had gone completely still and limp once again, head lulling back into the snow and the grass beneath. His hair spread out around him like a halo.

 

They kept shoveling more snow on as quickly as it melted, the crisp, clean air biting Daryl’s nose and ears in an unfamiliar way, but he hardly noticed, focused entirely on Paul. A few curious citizens had gathered around, keeping a cautious distance, thankfully, because if they dared get in the way Daryl knew he would throw them back without regard. Jesus didn’t move nor respond, and for what seemed like the longest time, Daryl was left with the silence pounding in his ears, and his mind, which cycled over and over through the worst-case scenarios. Paul could never wake up. A day ago could’ve been the last time they talked, the last time they looked each other in the eyes. How was this happening so fast? Why did it have to happen so fast?

 

Time seemed to stop, nature slowing to a halt as Jesus lay motionless, and finally, God-blessedly he began to shiver, hands and arms twitching just a little before beginning to vibrate in earnest, a sign the worst of his fever must’ve been broken. His jaw began to chatter and Alex let out a massive sign of relief, Daryl taking his cue to reach and touch Jesus’s face, patting him gently on the cheek to try and rouse him. He didn’t awaken, not yet, but his breathing started to deepen, his chest rising regularly with slow, soft breaths.

 

Alex reached across Daryl and checked Paul’s pupil response, finding it normal and nearly fainting with relief. Jesus started to sweat and shiver again, his body suddenly catching up to his miserable state, hands trembling awfully. Alex watched as Daryl leaned over him, watching his face intently and uselessly calling his name. Jesus was still unconscious, but they’d lowered the fever enough to keep his brain from shutting down.

 

Unbeknownst to Alex, Daryl had seen long ago the image of a brain going dark from an impossible fever, nerves shutting down and burning out like Christmas lights, each by each, until there was nothing but dark. Then, horrifically, the lights began to come back on, but the person was no longer there. And unbeknownst to Daryl, Alex had an agreement to be the one to do the now necessary deed if Paul was overcome by illness or injury, like a good doctor—a good friend—would.

 

They let Jesus lie out in the cold for another short while until they could be sure his temperature was going down, massaging his arms and flexing his fingers to ensure his circulation was steady. Eventually, they took him back inside and lay him on clean sheets, pulling a blanket over his body to protect him while his temperature started to slowly, slowly lower. Alex checked the thermometer before leaving the trailer and the lovers alone.

 

Daryl climbed up on the bed, sitting beside Paul and leaning over him on his elbows. Jesus looked his namesake, dirty, tired and common, but with a glow of otherworldly beauty that continued to throw Daryl askew every time he allowed himself the moment to examine Paul closely. Sometimes, it bothered him in the most intangible way how incredible Paul was, how genuine, how whole and solid, and that Daryl was allowed to have him, to be with him, to touch his hair and skin, to know him more intimately than anyone else. His hands shook, half with fatigue and half with anxiety, as he brought them around Paul’s head to cup it in two rough palms.

 

“Wake up, come on now,” Daryl whispered, “don’t you go nowhere. You ain’t goin’ nowhere.” His fingers traced Jesus’s temples, thumbs smoothing thin hairs back. “’M not goin’ nowhere, either.”

 

 

 

Jesus awoke just around the time Daryl was about ready to start ripping out his own hair and putting his fist through the plastic walls of the trailer. In the dark of the early morning, his eyes fluttered open, lidded with exhaustion, but bright and watercolour green, dry lips parted as his sinuses were still a little inflamed. Daryl leapt over to him immediately, almost tripping over a crack in the floor in his haste, dropping to a half-kneel beside the bed.

 

“Hey,” Jesus whispered, groggily sitting up, a small smile coming across his face at the subtle joy of just being able to move without his entire body crying out in pain. Daryl just stared at him, narrow eyes almost comically-wide, and Jesus had to give a bit of a laugh.

 

“Am I really awake, or—” he began, but Daryl leapt on him, clutching his face in two big hands and drawing him into a kiss. His taste was acrid, and Jesus imagined the inside of his own mouth wasn’t much better after just waking up and having eaten nothing in three days, but the kiss was so powerful, so honest and _real_ , just like every part of Daryl, that he wouldn’t have exchanged it for anything.

 

Daryl pulled away after a long, lingering moment, seemingly unable to let go, and put their foreheads together, breathing hard through his nose and just staring down at Paul’s chest. Watching it rise and fall with breath, steady and soft.

 

“Okay, this is definitely real,” Jesus whispered into the scant bit of space between them, “because I don’t think I could dream up you kissing me like _that_.”

 

Daryl didn’t have much to say after Jesus began to slowly heal, able to stand only a few hours later and take himself to the bathroom on his own, padding barefoot across the steel floor of the trailer, surprised by how cold it felt. The coolness was welcome, but it belied the temperature drop outside. Part of Jesus was worried for the upcoming winter months, but part of him was excited to show Daryl what Christmas in Virginia was like.

 

At dawn, Jesus felt well enough to leave, his symptoms cleared save for a bit of a phlegmy cough and an exhaustion that a good, solid meal or two and a night in his own bed could cure. Even Alex somewhat unhappily agreed that he could head home, as long as he stayed there and didn’t try going on runs for at least three more days. Daryl gathered his things silently from the trailer, bundling up his outer clothes and passing them wordlessly over, and Jesus felt distinctly like he was being waited upon. It was awkward, and he couldn’t help but think it had something to do with the argument they had a few days ago about Daryl leaving, and while he did not look forward to the discussion they were going to have to have about that, he was just happy to be up and moving.

 

Alex took a bit of issue with Jesus being upright so immediately, and definitely didn’t approve of the way Daryl smugly announced he’d “kissed it better”, as though his bedside manner was far more effective than Alex’s. Watching both men go red in the face with barely-hidden anger made Jesus want to laugh again, so he left quickly, grabbing a handful of antibiotics from Alex’s hand on his merry way out the door.

 

Despite his optimism about recovering, Jesus was still a little weak, and stumbled down the stairs of the trailer. Luckily Daryl caught him and scooped him up by the arm, squeezing just a little too hard on his bicep as he dragged him back up to his feet.

 

“I’m alright,” Jesus insisted, and Daryl reluctantly released him, although continued to hover close enough behind him as they walked that their shoulders brushed on every other step.

 

Jesus paused on at the bottom of the stairs. The Hilltop was covered in a thin blanket of snow, just barely enough to hide the brownness of the ground and melting quickly, but casting a charming, quiet glow over the fields and streets. There were footprints that had turned into shoe-shaped puddles traveling this way and that along the paths, welcome signs of life decorating the grounds, and in the distance, he saw his—his _and_ Daryl’s—trailer, lined with an icing sugar-white trim, and it had never looked more inviting.

 

“Ready to go home?” Jesus asked, turning to look at Daryl over his shoulder. The man stared back at him with piercing eyes, heavy with care and some lingering anxiety. The winter, like everything else in the New World, would bring its share of hardships, but Jesus was almost looking forward to facing them, if it meant he had Daryl by his side.

 

“Yeah,” Daryl answered, and the two took strides out into the fresh, white snow.


End file.
